NATO members agree on larger role in aiding Afghanistan

February 07, 2004|By Eric Schmitt, New York Times News Service.

MUNICH, Germany — NATO defense ministers agreed on Friday to take specific steps to strengthen the alliance's reconstruction role in Afghanistan with an eye toward eventually taking over most of the security and rebuilding tasks in the country.

The decision came during a closed, three-hour meeting in Munich, where Britain, Italy, Turkey and Norway made a commitment to the plan. They will lead four of five new NATO teams of soldiers and civilians who will fan out beyond Kabul to assist local authorities with security and rebuilding, a senior U.S. official said.

The Netherlands, Romania and Lithuania also indicated interest in contributing forces to the new teams, the official said.

The United States, Britain, New Zealand and Germany are operating eight provincial-reconstruction teams, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top U.S. officials have been pressing to create as many as 10 more before Afghanistan holds national and regional elections this summer.

"A number of countries volunteered to lead or participate in new provincial-reconstruction teams in Afghanistan," Rumsfeld told reporters after the meeting of 26 ministers of current and incoming NATO members.

The subject of Iraq was also discussed, with Rumsfeld saying there is no reason NATO could not establish new civil-military aid teams in the country by summer.

Peter Struck, the German defense minister, said that the alliance's differences over Iraq had been resolved--Germany and France led the opposition against the war to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. Other officials held out the possibility of broader European involvement in Iraq.

In Afghanistan, NATO has a 5,500-member peacekeeping force in and around Kabul, which operates separately from about 13,000 U.S.-led troops who are mainly focused on hunting down pockets of Al Qaeda and Taliban resistance.

But military commanders and diplomats have expressed concerns that since NATO decided in principle last October to expand its force beyond Kabul, its political commitments have outstripped its willingness to supply troops and equipment for the new missions.

NATO officials, for instance, fretted for weeks about whose troops would take the place of the German forces operating Kabul airport when their assignment ends soon. After most nations declined, Iceland finally agreed to supply most of the necessary firefighters and airport specialists, although the mission is still short a handful of air-traffic controllers, a senior NATO official said Friday.

Defense Minister David Pratt of Canada, which will assume control of the NATO peacekeeping force from Germany in the next few days, said that the alliance's effort to reach out into the Afghan countryside will require thousands of additional troops. They are needed to ensure "that not only Kabul enjoys a high level of security but also some of the outlying areas in the north, in the south and in the east," he said.

The new NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has said that the credibility of NATO is "on the line" in Afghanistan--its first mission outside the Europe-- and he underscored that "it's very important the political commitment NATO entered into be fulfilled."

That may be easier said than done. Since NATO decided in October to expand its force beyond Kabul, many nations have begged off additional troop commitments. Some countries have even proposed hiring civilian contractors to fulfill their promises in Afghanistan.

This reluctance has frustrated NATO's military commander, Gen. James Jones, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, who has urged members essentially to put up the additional troops as promised or scrap their ambitious plans.